The concept of resilience and digital sovereignty is often positioned as a problem for governments and institutions to worry about, but it’s also shaped significantly by individual choices about which tools we use, and where we place our trust and money.
And the good news is that it’s far easier to begin making changes at an individual level today, than it is for governments to unwind decades of technological dependence.
To rewind just a little, at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos this year, a core message that emerged was that sovereignty and resilience now mean the same thing. Prime ministers, policymakers and executives spoke openly about the importance of being technologically independent, and the risks of relying too heavily on a small number of foreign technology suppliers for everything from communications to cloud infrastructure.
“Europe has always been very open for global investors [. . .] but now we can see that these dependencies can be weaponised against us,” said Henna Virkkunen, the European Commission’s (EC) executive vice president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy. “That’s why it’s so important that we are not dependent on one country or one company when it comes to some very critical fields.”
This is far from theoretical. In February, US President Donald J. Trump issued an executive order imposing sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) after it issued arrest warrants against key Israeli leaders related to the war in Gaza. Among those affected was Karim Khan, the ICC’s chief prosecutor, who reportedly lost access not only to his UK bank account, but also to his Microsoft email account.
The incident was widely viewed in Europe as a stark demonstration of how US technology dominance could be weaponised, even against institutions operating in allied countries. As one Member of the European Parliament warned, it represented a form of “digital sabotage,” prompting renewed calls for Europe to reduce its exposure to foreign-controlled infrastructure.
Episodes like this have helped push digital sovereignty to the forefront of national resilience programs. Just last week, France announced that government agencies will phase out tools like Microsoft Teams and Zoom by 2027, replacing them with a domestic or European video conferencing platform called Visio. Data will be hosted locally, while transcripts and subtitles will be handled by French providers. The goal is clear: reduce exposure, regain control, and limit reliance on platforms governed by foreign jurisdictions.
“Video conferencing services now play a decisive role in the day-to-day operations of your central administrations,” French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said in a letter to his cabinet.
In the letter, Lecornu also pointed to the patchwork of video conferencing tools currently used across government as a growing liability.
“This fragmentation exposes the state to several risks, including increased complexity in interministerial cooperation, cybersecurity vulnerabilities, a lack of control over public data, dependence on non-European actors, and higher costs for the public sector,” he said.
This has been a growing trend across the EU bloc, with various administrations and local governments exploring ways to reduce their reliance on foreign-owned digital infrastructure.
But it’s not a straightforward transition. Freiburg city council in Germany recently abandoned its OpenOffice experiment and returned to Microsoft Office, citing stagnation, fragmentation, and usability issues. It was a tacit admission, perhaps, that while sovereignty is desirable, it comes with costs. Software still has to work, updates still have to ship, and users still expect things not to break.
These examples highlight the tensions now confronting Europe. Large bureaucracies move slowly, procurement cycles can last years, and reversing decades of technological dependence simply doesn’t happen overnight.
That reality helps explain why questions of digital resilience are increasingly relevant at an individual level, where change can happen immediately and incrementally.
It’s not all or nothing
Over the past decade, I’ve been making small steps toward reducing my own dependence on Big Tech. Not in an absolutist way, not with any illusions of purity, and often more out of curiosity than ideology. I wanted to see what was possible, what wasn’t, and where the friction really lay.
The first thing you learn is that opting out is rarely binary. Some things are surprisingly easy to replace, others are much more difficult.
Email, cloud storage, calendars, documents, VPNs, and password managers are a good example of what’s fairly easy. Swiss company Proton makes it relatively painless to move large parts of your digital life away from Google et al, and you can pay them a monthly or annual subscription for the privilege of knowing that YOU aren’t the product. The experience is mostly great, always “good enough,” and, importantly, it’s improving.
I also prefer to have many of my documents offline, stored locally on my machine. I recently transitioned from a very old version of Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, and honestly, I haven’t noticed any meaningful difference for normal day-to-day use in documents (LibreOffice Writer) and spreadsheets (LibreOffice Calc).
Some years ago, I went all-in on Affinity Photo, a superb professional-grade image editing and photo manipulation tool, developed by British software company Serif. This came after I grew increasingly frustrated with Adobe’s shift toward a subscription and cloud-based licensing model, which made Photoshop far less appealing. .
Unfortunately, Affinity was acquired by Australian Adobe rival Canva back in 2024, a move that inevitably reduced its independence as a standalone software vendor. But I still have the original perpetual licence to continue running Affinity Photo, well, perpetually.
For those looking for a Photoshop alternative today, Canva has since bundled Affinity Photo together with its other Affinity tools and made it available under a freemium model, lowering the barrier to entry while tying the software more closely to Canva’s wider platform.
Elsewhere, there are still a handful of capable, independent photo editing tools worth considering. GIMP remains a powerful open source image editor with a long development history. It might not match Photoshop feature-for-feature, but it still demonstrates that credible alternatives outside the Big Tech orbit still exist — albeit with trade-offs.
Productivity applications aside, other areas are much harder to disentangle yourself from. And messaging is one of them.
Messaging as social infrastructure
WhatsApp, for better or worse, has become social infrastructure. Try keeping up with your group activities or child’s sports clubs without it. I’ve tried multiple times. Each attempt ended the same way, with me feeling a distinct sense that I was becoming an administrative headache for those around me.
Next time your kid’s ballet or badminton coach says they’ll add you to the class WhatsApp group, just try asking them if they’d mind installing Signal. Or, just for a laugh, suggest that they set up a self-hosted Matrix server secured with end-to-end encryption, authenticated via PGP keys, with message backups stored on an air-gapped NAS in their garage. I recommend having a camera on hand to capture their expression; it’s a Kodak moment of the highest order.
That all said, I still use Signal when I can with certain of my like-minded contacts, which helps reduce my overall exposure and nudges a few conversations onto more privacy-respecting ground. But I am prepared to make the compromise on WhatsApp because, well, I don’t feel as though I have any other option.
It’s worth noting that none of this is accidental. People naturally follow the path of least resistance, and Big Tech has spent years paving that path very carefully. Network effects do most of the heavy-lifting, and it doesn’t really matter how good the alternative is if no one else is using it.
YouTube is similar. As someone who loves nothing more than diving into the video archives of random sports and music events of yesteryear, there is nothing else quite like it at the same scale. You absolutely can use it anonymously, but you lose features like ad-free viewing, channel subscriptions, and watchlists. So while you can improve privacy at the margins, you can’t fully replicate the experience without buying into the ecosystem, and that’s a compromise I’ve chosen to make.
Welcome to the world of Dark Pattern Design
One thing that becomes increasingly obvious as you try to rebalance your digital life is how deliberate many design choices are. When companies are legally required to let you opt out of something, the process is often buried, confusing, and needlessly onerous. But when they want you to adopt a new feature, the prompt is placed front and centre.
Recent examples abound. Meta’s opt-out process for using Facebook and Instagram data to train its AI models technically exists, but it was always designed to discourage follow-through. And WhatsApp’s decision to place its shiny new AI feature above the ‘new chat’ button in the main messages interface was no accident, either.
To be clear, this is an entirely rational product development strategy. These companies have enormous resources, world-class designers, and a clear incentive to keep users inside their ecosystems. Stickiness is the end-goal, and it works. Big Tech products are polished, well-integrated, and relentlessly improved. For all the criticism they attract, they have invested heavily in making their tools genuinely useful.
That investment is one reason alternatives struggle to compete, particularly at an organisational level. Open source, or otherwise independent, software can be excellent, but coordination is hard, funding is scarce, and long-term maintenance often suffers. For individuals, these gaps are manageable or tolerable, but for institutions, they can be deal-breakers.
I’ve found that following a healthy, “digitally resilient” regimen doesn’t have to be absolute. Using alternative tools where feasible, supporting smaller providers, and being more intentional about defaults all help reduce the risk of becoming too reliant on the services of one or two trillion-dollar vendors.
In my own case, that has meant settling into a hybrid digital life. I use non-Big Tech tools when they are “good enough,” and I accept Big Tech where the friction is too much. I use the likes of the Vivaldi mobile browser with Qwant as the search engine when all I need is basic information or to access specific web pages. But then I’ll revert to Google when I’m researching places to eat, because Google has done a pretty good job of aggregating practical, real-world context such as opening hours, reviews, and how busy a venue is likely to be.
From personal to political
What makes this interesting — and relevant to those wondering how to make their world a little more resilient — is how closely the personal mirrors the political.
At a national level, governments are grappling with the same trade-offs: control versus convenience, independence versus integration, resilience versus efficiency. The stakes are higher, the timelines longer, but the dynamics are remarkably similar.
Recent reporting on U.S. authorities attempting (Bloomberg paywall) to compel Meta to reveal the identities of anonymous users underscores why these questions matter. Control over platforms equals power over speech and information flows. Jurisdiction and ownership matter.
My dabblings in digital sovereignty is far from the only way to approach the problem, and there are many tools, configurations, and philosophies that lead to different outcomes. What works for one person won’t work for another. Some aren’t prepared to give an inch to the tech behemoths of the world, and others don’t care a jot about any of this.
What I’ve arrived at is far from perfect. It’s a compromise shaped by convenience, necessity, and a dose of resignation. But it’s also a step away from total dependency, and a reminder that resilience and digital sovereignty can start far closer to home than you may have realised.
